Your friends and fellow hikers bought 10 items from Amazon.com in the past week. Interestingly, only three were things I thought folks might be interested in buying; the rest were all other stuff folks decided they liked better after they clicked on one my links. Turns out Amazon pays a commission for anything somebody buys once one of my links gets ’em in the door (the commission is laughably small, especially on paperback books, but every little bit is more than zero, I figure).
Ralph (aka TimeCheck) says I ought to add links to REI gear as well. I have no valid reason not to beyond general lassitude and reluctance to overly annoy readers with the online equivalent of standing at a busy intersection holding a hand-scrawled “please help” sign.
One a side note, I’m increasingly amazed at the degree to which Amazon, like Google, appears bent on world domination. Who knew you could, for instance, subscribe to Backpacker
And this is amusing: Note the No. 1 item when you click on this Amazon.com link. It’s supposed to search on every item there with “amazon.com” in the title but the results are sexier than you might suspect.
I think Amazon has become so big and powerful that it can now dictate much of what happens in book publishing. Amazon is focused on increasing its profits, and those profits come in part from the very deep discounts they demand from publishers.
Re Backpacker Magazine subscriptions: If you join American Hiking Society ($25 for seniors) http://www.americanhiking.org you get a free subscription to Backpacker Magazine.